Re: How to improve db performance with $7K?

Alex Turner wrote:
> I'm no drive expert, but it seems to me that our write performance is
> excellent. I think what most are concerned about is OLTP where you
> are doing heavy write _and_ heavy read performance at the same time.
>
> Our system is mostly read during the day, but we do a full system
> update everynight that is all writes, and it's very fast compared to
> the smaller SCSI system we moved off of. Nearly a 6x spead
> improvement, as fast as 900 rows/sec with a 48 byte record, one row
> per transaction.

I've started with SATA in a multi-read/multi-write environment. While it
ran pretty good with 1 thread writing, the addition of a 2nd thread
(whether reading or writing) would cause exponential slowdowns.

I suffered through this for a week and then switched to SCSI. Single
threaded performance was pretty similar but with the advanced command
queueing SCSI has, I was able to do multiple reads/writes simultaneously
with only a small performance hit for each thread.

Perhaps having a SATA caching raid controller might help this situation.
I don't know. It's pretty hard justifying buying a $$$ 3ware controller
just to test it when you could spend the same money on SCSI and have a
guarantee it'll work good under multi-IO scenarios.